Kirsten and Natalie #3: Jumanji (1995) and Mars Attacks! (1996)

(Kirsten and Natalie is a series tracing American womanhood as portrayed through the films of Kirsten Dunst and Natalie Portman. Read the introductory post here.)

Mars Attacks! might be the most significant movie of Natalie Portman's career. Barring that, I think it's the first "real" Natalie Portman performance.

A few weeks ago, a writer tweeted about how he had rewatched Léon and found himself sad at the wasted potential of Natalie Portman. (He got enough grief for it at the time, so I'm not going to link to his tweet.) The most uncharitable interpretation of his tweet was that he was being a big ol' creeper. But as someone going through Portman's filmography, I could see where he was coming from, even as I get why she very intentionally stretched her career in an incredibly different direction post-Beautiful Girls.

In Léon, Portman is a livewire. Her performance is unexpected and brilliant and just a little bit dangerous. It is clearly the work of a major talent, even if she hasn't competely figured all of her craft out just yet. And I think if it had stopped there, if she had just been the wise-beyond-her-years girl up on screen, she might have continued to pursue those sorts of roles. You can even see the early versions of what that career might have looked like in Beautiful Girls.

But Portman has explained that things didn't stop with people finding her performance in Léon impressive. No, a lot of people made it horrifying. Here's how she recalled that time at the Los Angeles Women's March in 2018:

I turned 12 on the set of my first film, The Professional, in which I played a young girl who befriends a hit man and hopes to avenge the murder of her family. The character is simultaneously discovering and developing her womanhood, her voice and her desire. At that moment in my life, I, too, was discovering my own womanhood, my own desire and my own voice. I was so excited at 13 when the film was released and my work and my art would have a human response. I excitedly opened my first fan-mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me. A countdown was started on my local radio station to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my “budding breasts” in reviews.
I understood very quickly even as a 13-year-old, if I were to express myself sexually, that I would feel unsafe, and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body, to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a kissing scene, and talked about that choice deliberately in interviews. I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was, and I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious in an attempt to feel that my body was safe and my voice would be listened to. At 13 years old, the message from our culture was clear to me. I felt the need to cover my body and inhibit my expression and my work in order to send my own message to the world, that I’m someone worthy of safety and respect.

And to look at Portman's career in the wake of that early realization is to see someone who largely leaned into the career presented by her second feature film role: playing Al Pacino's stepdaughter in Michael Mann's Heat. Playing the younger woman relative of a great actor in an auteur's project? She could do that! And at Christmas in 1996, she starred in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You and Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!

(I'm not covering Everyone Says I Love You here, both due to the Woody Allen of it all and because I'm having to contort myself a bit to match up Dunst and Portman movies here in the early going. But it's a very strange movie that captures a very blinkered New York City experience even better than Allen typically does.)

Portman has a fairly small role in Mars Attacks!, especially compared to what Dunst was up to in Jumanji, but she's clearly enjoying getting to play President Jack Nicholson's surly teenage daughter. (Incidentally, weird family casting is a hallmark of the disaster movies Burton and screenwriter Jonathan Gems are lampooning in Mars Attacks!, but it's very amusing to me to imagine Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close's DNA combining to create Natalie Portman.) The role is not much of a stretch for her. It's largely a version of her Heat character played for laughs. But she's having a blast all the same, and if you follow her career from here, you'll note how often she seems to eschew more conventional choices in the name of embracing weirder roles. I honestly think that began here, with Mars Attacks!

Check out, for instance, her delivery of her one line in the below scene. For me, it was the biggest laugh of a surprisingly funny movie.

‎Mars Attacks! has aged surprisingly well. I don't think it's a great movie or anything, but its '90s cynicism seems like it's almost anticipating the American foreign policy arguments of the 2000s. At first, the film seems like it's siding with a conservative critique of liberal unwillingness to use overwhelming force, but then the film is just as sure that overwhelming force wouldn't work either. In a movie like this one, you only survive by complete accident. That idea ended up reverberating throughout Portman's entire career.

When I paired Mars Attacks! and Jumanji in my schedule for this series, I was expecting to find both Portman and Dunst relegated to the sidelines of their movies. That's true of Taffy in Mars Attacks!, but that's because Portman is starring in a very conscious disaster movie riff, which means that all of the parts are ensemble parts by design. Danny De Vito turns up and says maybe 10 lines, if that. So that Portman not only survives the movie but seemingly gets to become the teen girl president of the U.S., presenting the Medal of Honor to the boy and grandmother who figured out how to defeat the Martians, makes her stick in the memory, even if she completely disappears from the film about halfway through. (She gets separated from her parents in a Martian attack, then somehow survives while both of her parents die.)

‎I had remembered Dunst being similarly sidelined in Jumanji, but the truth is that she's all over that movie. Yes. she's not part of the film's rather lengthy prologue about how a little boy gets sucked into the titular board game, where he stays for 26 years, before emerging as Robin Williams. But the second the film transitions to 1995, she's in nearly every scene. She's Judy, the older of two orphans, who constantly tells wild lies about how her parents died and who tries to protect her younger brother, who refuses to speak to anybody who's not her. (Bebe Neuwirth is their aunt and guardian, who seems flummoxed by the concept of children in general.)

You can see the general suggestion of a character arc here: Judy is a compulsive liar and storyteller, who will gradually come to reckon with the truth of her parents' death, while her brother will similarly find a way to deal with his own communication issues. None of this is rocket science, but it's at least set up well.

But once Williams enters the movie, it ceases to really be about the kids, even though they're in nearly every scene. Dunst, who has marked herself as such an energetic performer in her other early roles, seems utterly adrift in the sea of rudimentary special effects. The special effects in both of these movies are awful, but the ones in Mars Attacks! have aged charmingly, because the movie isn't pretending to aim for verisimilitude. The jungle creatures in Jumanji just look garish and ugly, and all of the performers get lost inside the action of swatting at pretend beasts they can't see. It's very early CGI, and the whole movie is a reminder that a big problem with early CGI wasn't just the quality of the craftsmanship. It was that the actors didn't entirely know how to play off something that wasn't there. (In Mars, Nicholson attempts to swat at an alien hand as it crawls around his body, and his movements and the effect seem to have no relationship to each other.)

I have many problems with Jumanji, despite the best efforts of my boy, director Joe Johnston, but most of them boil down to how resistant the story is to anything human at all. At a certain point, the challenge becomes "Can the characters roll the dice in time and avoid certain death?" and the stakes are somehow too big and too small at the same time. Judy's suggested character arc is eventually trampled by the movie's many jungle animals, and anyway, her efforts to grapple with her parents' death are completely wiped away by a climax that rewrites history itself so that her parents may live. It's a very weird film.

But both Jumanji and Mars Attacks! are weird in a couple of instructive fashions, at least insofar as this series is concerned. The first is the notable historic nature of the fact that Dunst and Portman are part of a generation that didn't really have to relearn how to perform to act with computer effects. If you watch Jumanji closely, Dunst is by far the performer who's best handling the bits where she swings at imaginary animals, far better than even Williams. Millennial actors, like millennials more generally, would find facility with technology that took older performers time to wrap their brains around.

But the other instructive thing worth noting here is that even as Portman left behind roles in which she was defined by how attractive she was to much older men, she wound up in roles where she was defined by being the daughter of a much older man. It was a type of role made less easily creepy, but it was still a role where she was not particularly allowed to define her character beyond the narrow confines of how she fit into a guy's story.

The same is even more dramatically true for Dunst in Jumanji. While Judy is the character who has the most verve in the early going of the 1995 storyline, she slowly recedes from the movie the longer it goes on, to the degree that her brother slowly grows in prominence as the movie continues. For some reason, Jumanji decides that its most important story is going to be the romance between Robin Williams and Bonnie Hunt, who is playing a character who spent 26 years pining away for a boy who got sucked into a board game, even as she convinced herself it never happened.

One reason I decided to take on Kirsten and Natalie was to get a sense of how I was learning my gender without realizing I was learning my gender. And after a bunch of fascinating movies that allowed Dunst and Portman some measure of autonomy and character development, both Jumanji and Mars Attacks! slowly siphon them off, drip by drip, until their movies seem to lose interest in them entirely. It served as a harbinger for where their careers would head across the next 20-plus years, and it served as a lesson I didn't realize I was learning: The story might seem like it's about you, but if you're a teenage girl, it probably isn't. Is there an A-list actor around? He's the guy you're looking for.

‎Next time on Kirsten and Natalie: Natalie Portman doesn't make another movie after Mars Attacks! until she makes The Phantom Menace. We'll deal with the Star Wars films in a later installment, but the next installment is all Kirsten Dunst, as I watch every movie she made between the years 1999 and 2001, years that cemented her stardom. Come for Bring It On; stay for Dick.

Talk back to me: I gather Jumanji has become a classic for a lot of people around my age. Defend yourselves!!! This movie stinks!

What I've been up to: It's been ages since I did a newsletter with all the usual boilerplate stuff down here, so I've been up to a lot. But in the interest of not linking you to everything I've ever written, I'll point you to this recent piece on the ways that former evangelicals are creating art about the weird legacy of the church. I talked to Lucy Dacus!!

You might be tempted to call Monica West’s terrific 2021 novel Revival Season “magical realism.” It features, after all, a protagonist who may or may not have the power to heal people by laying her hands on them, and it takes place in a world where the miraculous is rare but not unheard of. But West’s novel doesn’t take place in some alternate reality. It takes place in the Black evangelical church in Texas, a world that possesses a bone-deep belief that God can reach down into the world and enact miracles, if only his worshippers entreat him purely enough. And though I grew up in a rural, predominantly white evangelical church in South Dakota, the hardcore belief of West’s characters was familiar to me in a way that filled me with a kind of relief, even though I haven’t been an evangelical Christian for decades. Finally, somebody got it.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: A number of circumstances have ground the freelancing machine to a halt of late, but I have a bunch of pieces in the works, and we should be getting them going again very soon. In the meantime, you can check out these amazing recent pieces on The Sopranos and The Matrix Resurrections. They're exactly the sort of freelance pieces I started this newsletter to be able to publish. (And don't forget that if you subscribe, you also get my Cowboy Bebop recaps!)

When the medium talks to a spirit [in Sopranos], the scene presents a rough shot/reverse shot sequence, cutting between the medium and the space the ghost supposedly inhabits. The still camerawork of most of the sequence contrasts with the more jittery shots of the empty space. As the camera slightly wavers side to side, you can notice what seems to be a lowered shutter speed, which creates a sense of something ephemeral, a momentary stillness. Motion has been interrupted. What should be routine is now marked by emptiness. There's an absence of presence (no one is in this space) and regular motion (thanks to the lowered shutter speed). It's like someone tampered with the episode we're watching, cutting out frames of film to remove any sense of completion or harmony.

Read me: Katharine Cross's piece on Wired about how even obliquely commenting on the discourse on Twitter ends up being a form of harassment has really changed how I approach social media usage. I think it's a must-read!

But it’s the third order that gets at what the rest of this essay is about. This third order is not hacking the target or engaging with them to spew abuse—rather, it describes the simple act of commenting on the situation. It is the enabling, apologism, and justificatory discourse about the target that ensures most people participating feel as if they’re doing the right thing and makes more overt and intense forms of harassment possible.

Watch me: I haven't been watching a lot of stuff lately, but I did get to see the 2005 Pride & Prejudice in theaters a few weeks ago, and I think I'm going to force you to watch this tracking shot from it, which is one of my favorite long takes in movie history. It's so good! It makes me cry every time I see it!

And another thing... Fuck it. Here's Octordle.

Opening credits sequence of the week: Captain Nice was, uh, evidently created by Buck Henry? And it starred William Daniels? I mean, I guess!

A thing I had to look up: Every time I write one of these, I end up revisiting Portman's 2018 speech, and it hits a little harder with every new time I check it out.

This week's reading music: "Bad Feeling" by Cobra Man

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.